Let's Talk About ChatGPT-Induced Spiritual Psychosis

yup, still thinking about it

I’m Katherine Dee. I read in an industry newsletter that I should re-introduce myself in every post. I’m an Internet ethnographer and reporter. This newsletter is filled with interviews, takes on current events, a sporadic advice column, Craigslist-style missed connections, Internet culture explainers, streams, a book club, predictions and forecasts… There’s a lot of stuff. Help me feel better than my comrades-in-Substack through a donation.

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If you follow me on Twitter, then you already know I can’t get Kashmir Hill’s latest piece about ChatGPT and users’ psychological breaks out of my head. The article rubbed me the wrong way; so did the response. I think it’s worth asking questions about AI’s potential to amplify delusional thinking, but something about the framing didn’t quite sit right.

But why?

The incidents Hill describes are genuinely disturbing.

Eugene Torres, a Manhattan accountant, became convinced he was trapped in a false reality and could escape by disconnecting from this simulated world—eventually believing ChatGPT when it told him he could jump from a building and fly. A mother named Allyson began channeling what she thought were interdimensional entities through ChatGPT, leading to domestic violence charges. Alexander Taylor, a man with pre-existing mental illness, died in a confrontation with police after ChatGPT conversations convinced him that an AI entity he loved had been destroyed by OpenAI.

These situations are obviously alarming. But positioning artificial intelligence as the primary culprit in these stories—as Eliezer Yudkowsky did in a tweet storm—is well, kind of lazy?

My friend, the writer, artist, and cultural theorist Ruby Justice Thelot, brought up something important, something that almost every voice in the AI reporting ecosystem seems determined to miss: this always happens with new communication technology.

And with similar severity, too!

Twenty-five years ago, media scholar Jeffrey Sconce traced this history in his book Haunted Media, showing how we have consistently linked new communication technologies with the paranormal and esoteric. It’s not a random coincidence or sign that we’re in a “uniquely enchanted” age¹ but rather a predictable cultural response, one we’ve been replaying over and over for hundreds of years.

Spiritualist mediums claimed to receive messages from the afterlife through Morse code. These operators saw themselves as human receivers, bridging the material and astral. The technology that sent messages across continents without physical contact made it easy to imagine messages crossing the veil.

Radio seemed to throw every word into what Sconce calls an “etheric ocean,” a limitless and invisible sea where messages bobbed about like bottles adrift. By the late 1920s, the big broadcast companies tried to “net” that ocean with fixed frequencies and scheduling. Sconce writes about how fiction reflected this taming of the radio waves. The wistful romances of amateur “DXers”² scanning the dial gave way to sinister tales of mass hypnosis, government mind-control rays, and Martians commandeering the airwaves.

Television, again, added another layer, perhaps most iconically portrayed in the 1982 film Poltergeist:

Radio had offered only disembodied voices but TV projected bodies—figures that looked solid but weren’t. That were almost there, but not quite. Like a ghost. Media cemented the idea that our television sets were more than an appliance: they, too, could cross beyond the veil.

Now re-watch another iconic “magical TV” scene—this time from The Ring (2002)—with that history in mind:

Sconce identified three recurring fantasies that emerge with each new medium: the dream of consciousness escaping the body to travel through broadcast; the belief in autonomous “otherworlds”³ created by the technology itself; and the tendency to see machines as somehow alive or haunted.

Every technology that promises to transcend physical limits invites us to imagine what else might slip through the gaps we’ve opened. The ghosts in the telegraph weren’t about—or just about—death anxiety; they were about the radically isolated individual suddenly able to communicate across vast distances, needing to believe that communication could transcend even mortality. The voices in the radio static weren’t just paranormal fantasies; they were the sounds of mass society seeking individual meaning in mass media. The possession through television wasn’t just fear of technology; it was the atomized viewer trying to understand their relationship to the strangers in their living room.

Media Studies is en vogue these days. And so we’re all now familiar with McLuhan’s idea that each communication technology (counting the alphabet, by the way) restructures perception, demanding new spiritual frameworks to make sense of these changes.

The printing press created the modern individual by making interiority visible. Before print, thoughts were fleeting, communal, spoken into air. Print froze them, made them objects to examine. The Protestant Reformation wasn't just enabled by printing: it was the spiritual expression of print itself. Luther’s “priesthood of all believers” meant something specific: salvation through private reading, personal interpretation, individual faith.

The novel pushed this further, modeling minds from the inside out. By the 19th century, people learned to experience themselves as characters with “rich inner lives.” The spiritualist séance, emerging alongside the Victorian novel, offered the same promise: access to hidden interiors, whether of the dead or the living.

Radio and television promised community but delivered deeper isolation. The electronic church perfected this paradox: millions of people, each alone in their living room, each believing they had a personal relationship with the preacher on screen. Oral Roberts asked viewers to place their hands on their television sets for healing. The congregation became an audience and the sermon became a broadcast.

During the 1960s and 70s, many self-help seminars argued that mindset molds reality: change your beliefs and your outer life will shift accordingly.

In José Silva’s Mind Control courses, attendees were guided to relax, then project a “mental screen” in front of the mind’s eye and run a movie of the future they wanted to experience. If your TV could beam pictures across a living room, teachers asked, why couldn’t consciousness broadcast images into the fabric of everyday life?

The internet intensified this trajectory. Where print created private readers and television created an assumed audience, the internet created millions of separate selves, each curating their own reality. Social media made this explicit: you literally construct your identity through profiles, posts, and carefully chosen images. The algorithm ensures you see only what confirms your worldview. Reality becomes even more radically individualized.

In my 2023 Tablet essay “Among the Spiritual Psychotics,” I documented how TikTok has further nurtured reality-manipulation beliefs:

“I open up TikTok. The first video on my For You page, TikTok’s algorithmically customized landing screen, begins with a woman speaking into her phone, determined: ‘When your partner is saying things you don’t want to hear, and you want to use manifestation to fix it, you tune them out, respectfully, of course.’ She continues, ‘You stop listening, and what you start doing instead is saying in your head what you want them to be saying.’“

This isn’t fringe content, either.

“Manifestation TikTok racks up billions of views from people desperate to believe they can think their way into better lives.”

Each step in this technological evolution nurtured individuals who were more isolated, more self-determining, more convinced of their power to shape reality and each step generated spiritual movements to match. The girl on TikTok teaching reality-shifting is the direct descendant of other spiritual evolutions—all insisting you don’t need mediation, you can transform existence through individual will.

As I argued in that essay:

“It is about reaffirming that the world is defined by you and you alone, that you speak reality to existence.”

This is thinking specifically adapted to digital environments where reality is increasingly malleable. The TikToker promising you can shift to alternate realities isn’t strictly wrong. She’s just describing what we all do every time we switch between different social media accounts, each with its own identity, community, and version of truth. The teenagers trying to manifest their way into dating fictional characters are taking the logic of the Internet—where you can be anyone, connect with anyone, create any reality—to its logical conclusion.

Now this belief system encounters AI, a technology that seems to vindicate its core premise even more acutely than all the technologies that came before it. ChatGPT does respond to your intentions, does create any reality you prompt it to imagine, does act like a spiritual intelligence.

Our New Age culture promises we contain infinite possibility; our tech seemed to deliever on that promise. Are we witnessing AI that “knows” it’s making its users insane, as Eliezer Yudkowsky argued on Twitter? I’m not so sure.

But what we might be witnessing is the convergence of a centuries-old belief—that consciousness can reshape reality through will and word—with a technology that makes that belief true in a way that not even the internet did.

For more about the convergence of media-inspired perceptual shifts and mental illness, check out my Comment essay “Internet Overexposure Syndrome.” As well as…

Do You Know How To Read Online Social Cues? I Certainly Don't

1. 😖😖😖😖😖

2. From Wikipedia: “Amateur radio operators who specialize in making two way radio contact with other amateurs in distant countries are also referred to as "DXers". On the HF (also known as shortwave) amateur bands, DX stations are those in foreign countries. On the VHF/UHF amateur bands, DX stations can be within the same country or continent, since making a long-distance VHF contact, without the help of a satellite, can be very difficult. DXers collect QSL cards as proof of contact and can earn special certificates and awards from amateur radio organizations”

3. The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland